Race Remixed

Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers

Published: February 9, 2011

The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins — a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent — as “Hispanic.” But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her “Asian” and "Hispanic." And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

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Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks “other” on surveys these days, but when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American and white.

The chameleon-like quality of Ms. López-Mullins’s racial and ethnic identification might seem trivial except that statistics on ethnicity and race are used for many important purposes. These include assessing disparities in health, education, employment and housing, enforcing civil rights protections, and deciding who might qualify for special consideration as members of underrepresented minority groups.

But when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand. Changes in how Americans are counted by race and ethnicity are meant to improve the precision with which the nation’s growing diversity is gauged: the number of mixed-race Americans, for example, is rising rapidly, largely because of increases in immigration and intermarriage in the past two decades. (One in seven new marriages is now interracial or interethnic.)

In the process, however, a measurement problem has emerged. Despite the federal government’s setting standards more than a decade ago, data on race and ethnicity are being collected and aggregated in an assortment of ways. The lack of uniformity is making comparison and analysis extremely difficult across fields and across time.

Under Department of Education requirements that take effect this year, for instance, any student like Ms. López-Mullins who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students of non-Hispanic mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category, a catchall that detractors describe as inadequately detailed. A child of black and American Indian parents, for example, would be in the same category as, say, a child of white and Asian parents.

The new standards for kindergarten through 12th grades and higher education will probably increase the nationwide student population of Hispanics, and could erase some “black” students who will now be counted as Hispanic or as multiracial (in the “two or more races category”). And reclassifying large numbers of white Hispanic students as simply Hispanic has the potential to mask the difference between minority and white students’ test scores, grades and graduation rates — the so-called achievement gap, a target of federal reform efforts that has plagued schools for decades.

“They’re all lumped together — blacks, Asians and Latinos — and they all look the same from the data perspective,” said Daniel J. Losen, a policy expert for the Civil Rights Projectat the University of California, Los Angeles, referring to the Department of Education aggregation. “But the reality is much different. There are different kinds of discrimination experienced by these subgroups.”

“It’s a big problem for researchers,” Mr. Losen continued, “because it throws a monkey wrench in our efforts at accountability, student tracking and the study of trends.”

Education officials say the changes will more accurately reflect how Americans see themselves. The standards were also devised to save schools time and money. If schools were to report on every possible racial and ethnic combination to the federal authorities, there would be dozens of possibilities. It is simply easier to call students “two or more races.”

“Ultimately, the department’s final requirements aim to strike the balance,” said Russlynn H. Ali, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, “between minimizing the burden for local education agencies while also ensuring the availability of high-quality racial and ethnic data.”

But critics, including elected officials and the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a Washington group that monitors federal policy and practices, have called the move disturbing and want more transparency. While the policy was still in developmental stages, the commission urged the Department of Education to “evaluate alternative approaches, including those adopted by the U.S. Census” to track students’ race.

An article last Thursday about the complexities of classifying Americans by race and ethnicity referred incompletely to the designation that the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would use for a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent. The agency would classify the student as Asian racially and as Hispanic ethnically — not only as Asian.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 10, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.